Breaking Bad

[justdrew]

[smiths]

'Breaking Bad'
Kemsley, Jyllian
Chemical & Engineering News, March 3, 2008, Vol.86(9), p.32(2)

Breaking Bad and Philosophy Badder Living through Chemistry.
David R. Koepsell Robert Arp 2012
New York : Open Court, 2012

The revolution was televised : from Buffy to Breaking bad : the people and the shows that changed TV drama forever
Alan Sepinwall 1973- 2013
Collingwood, Vic. : Black, 2013.

Killer entertainment. (television programs 'Dexter' and 'Breaking Bad')
Mirsky, Steve
Scientific American, April, 2011, Vol.304(4), p.92(1)

Cult Telefantasy Series A Critical Analysis of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, Heroes, Doctor Who and Star Trek.
Sue Short Donald E Palumbo; C.W Sullivan 2011, Jefferson : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011

Looking for Lost Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series, Randy Laist 2011, Jefferson : McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011

In ‘Lost,’ Mythology Trumps Mystery
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/21/arts/ ... .html?_r=0

Trends in political television fiction in the UK: Themes, characters and narratives, 1965–2009
Van Zoonen, Liesbet ; Wring, Dominic
Media, Culture & Society, 2012, Vol.34(3), pp.263-279

[Carol Newquist]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who missed Breaking Bad last night. We got to the point where we would say to each other Sunday mornings, or Sunday midday, "Walt's on tonight!" in anticipation. Not so yesterday.

Anyhow, there's been some discussion that the finale, Felina, had a double meaning, and the other hidden meaning is a spiritual/religious one.....that Walt was really dead and maybe somehow rose again for his last act. It's an interesting theory. I'm not sure I buy into it completely, but some of the elements have merit and it's worth exploring and/or considering. I mean, what else is there to do if we're extinct as a species by 2032?

http://freebeacon.com/blog/walter-white-jesus-christ-superstar/

Walter White: Jesus Christ, Superstar

In this last run of episodes, the smart set of critics have basically competed with each other over how much they hate Walter White—and how stupid anyone who doesn’t hate Walter White is. “How dare you silly people on the Internet defend Walt? He’s evil!” “He’s irredeemably evil!” “He’s super-duper monstrous!” “He’s going to kill all the characters and rape their corpses because he’s EVIL EVIL EVIL.” You get the idea.

So how did Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s showrunner, close it out? He trolled them all as hard as he possibly could.

He made Walter White Jesus Christ.

Four points:

1. Walter, while checking out the massive manse of his billionaire buddies—who the smart set all kind of thought Walt was on the path to murder—looks out the a massive window and notes that they must have a great view of the Sangre de Cristo, a mountain chain whose name translates to “The Blood of Christ”;

2. Walter, while setting up the gun with which he ruins the Aryan Brotherhood’s business, hurts his hand and grasps his palm in pain;

3. Walter, while saving Jesse’s life, suffers a mortal wound on his side, right under his right breast;

4. Walter, while dying, collapses to the ground, arms spread to the side, in the figure of the cross.*

Walter White spent the entirety of that episode sacrificing himself to save the people he loved: his wife, his kids, his surrogate son Jesse. He rid himself of his earthly possessions and made peace with those who had wronged him and those he had wronged (one way or another) so as to prepare himself for the afterlife. His business complete, he was ready to ascend.

I wonder if Gilligan was sitting there laughing to himself, watching all the critics talk about how irredeemably awful Walter White is. I wonder if he was sitting there, laughing, because of his Catholic sensibility. I wonder if he was sitting there, laughing, because he feels everyone is redeemable.

I’m sure there will be much said tonight and tomorrow about Breaking Bad’s finale. For my part, it’s the best conclusion of a great TV show since The Shield, another show deeply concerned with original sin and the way in which it informs the behavior, and redemption (or lack thereof), of its main character. But I’ll let others handle that.

For now, all I want to leave you with is this: Walter White redeemed himself. And it’s going to drive a ton of people nuts.

*I also think Vince Gilligan and company were trolling the hell out of the creators of Lost, who ended their show on a much less satisfying note by doing essentially the same thing that Breaking Bad did. The camera, resting above Walt, pulls back and up as he dies. It’s the exact same shot that Lost used to end that show, with Dr. Jack in the position of Walt.

[Col Quisp]

I have not read this thread yet because I have not seen the show. I read a few of the opening posts here and now I'm convinced I must watch it. I tried to watch it once, but started in on the 4th season and it made no sense to me so I gave up. I've heard so many good things about it, I guess I will start from the beginning. Thankfully, it's available on Netflix streaming, which I just now subscribed to, for my new Kindle Fire, which I love. It was a birthday present to myself. Also the price has dropped really low, just before they unveiled the new improved version. Grrr.

[justdrew]

it's interesting, but there's absolutely ZERO talk in the show about WHY it's wrong to make meth. ZERO. No one even gives a shit. How many end-users lives were ruined or lost? Obviously they didn't want to get preachy and be all "drugs are bad em'kay?" but it wouldn't have ruined things to somehow work in some of the end-users of the product. Well, I guess there was one in season 1 or 2 briefly.

In a way, Criminal Enterprise has become America's only remaining Real frontier. A decadent civilization content to curl up fetal and wait it out. Once upon a time and not that long ago, Walt would have been working on an orbital colony or moon base or undersea city, or bringing better living through chemistry to the developing world, quite plausibly in the year 2013. The real take away should be the drying up of opportunity and lack of capital willing to risk anything at all to open up something new.

[waugs]

it's interesting, but there's absolutely ZERO talk in the show about WHY it's wrong to make meth. ZERO. No one even gives a shit. How many end-users lives were ruined or lost? Obviously they didn't want to get preachy and be all "drugs are bad em'kay?" but it wouldn't have ruined things to somehow work in some of the end-users of the product. Well, I guess there was one in season 1 or 2 briefly..

I think there's many examples throughout the series of the effects of the drug on people (directly and indirectly). There are numerous meth users shown in the series whose lives are obviously shattered by the drug and the whole series shows how Walt's involvement literally destroyed lives directly (murder, etc) and indirectly (the father of Jesse's girlfriend, Jane)--shit, his mistake caused the deaths of hundreds of people who were in the plane crash over Alberquerque. Granted, most of the examples of the effects of the drug on people (directly) are in the first few seasons, but the entire story revolves around how the drug has a hand in the deaths of tons of people, despite Walt's reasoning behind making it. Jesse is a good example of how the drug was destroying him by it's use and then how it shattered his life because he continued to manufacture it.

I think the creator was telling the story in a subtle way and in some ways, was assuming that the people watching the show had a certain level of intelligence. He didn't have to spell it out constantly, that yes, meth is a horrible and dangerous drug.

[smiths]

i find the Christ reading quite interesting, and the images that support it

i switched to watching the new season of Homeland on a Monday night (Australian necessity) which is shit so far,
many would probably argue that it was always shit ...

[justdrew]

yeah waugs, you're right. but I stand by the sad fact that criminal enterprise has become a sort of fantasy land escape dream, in lieu of any other option (as far as most can see).

let's just examine his initials: WW
four roman numeral fives?
a closeup of the top of Bart's head?
V____ volks wagon (Jack... a good german word starting with a V to go there?)
maybe Verdammt VolksWagon

Other famous WWs...

Walter Winchell, Walt Whitman, Wilbur Wright, Willie Wonka, William Warfield, William Westmoreland, Wendy O. Williams...

[Carol Newquist]

Once upon a time and not that long ago, Walt would have been working on an orbital colony or moon base or undersea city, or bringing better living through chemistry to the developing world, quite plausibly in the year 2013.

Harm is a matter of scale. How much more harm could Walt have done had he been the leading scientist for Monsanto creating ever better GMO every year? Yet, to many, that's a moral act for which he is applauded and awarded, despite the fact that GMO is quite literally killing us and the planet systematically. Does Meth ruin lives? Sure, it does, and it has. But GMO makes its effects look miniscule in comparison, yet Meth is evil and pernicious.....a plague....an epidemic....and illegal. It's overuse is precisely because it, and drugs, are illegal. If there's one positive point I would have hoped people would have taken away from all this, it's that Breaking Bad isn't even an idea if not for The War on Drugs. I brought this idea up at Rolling Stone....and it got mostly thumbs down...at fucking Rolling Stone, for Christ's Sake. If that doesn't prove that Rolling Stone, like any other Progressive rag, isn't now controlled by intelligence services, then nothing will prove it. FYI, I don't read Rolling Stone. I only visited the site because of a BB review....and I found a bunch of Puritans camped out in the comment section of one of the premier 60's counter-culture publications. I thank Hugh for understanding what's at play with this bullshit. He may have gotten too deep with it on occasion, but he validated so many of my suspicions. Hugh, for me, was like a pair of reading glasses. Because of Hugh, what I witnessed at Rolling Stone makes sense.

[Carol Newquist]

We all take part in destroying lives every day, even our own lives. We contribute to the Cold Evil of the technological cocoon in everything we do, up to and including discussing it here and all it entails for us to be able to do that. This Cold Evil is distinct from Hot Evil where harm and trauma are inflicted in person, hand to hand, or mano y mano, in a very personal and up-close way.

Walt journeyed from the inoculated and insular Cold Evil existence where he sleepwalked through life as a long-distance killer like all the rest of us, to the tumultuous, up close and personal Hot Evil existence of adrenaline pumping, primal brutality. Each existence is immoral, but I would argue the former is vastly more dangerous, and exacts much more pain and suffering than Walt's Hot Evil existence, as dramatic and theatrical as it was.

http://neweconomy.net/publications/lectures/kimbrell/andrew/cold-evil

Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics

II. The Enigma of Modern Evil

For many of us during the Vietnam War era there was little confusion about ethics or evil. “Evil” was no enigma or dilemma; it seemed easy to recognize. We saw as evil the greed of Wall Street and its neo-colonialist drive to maintain control of Third World resources. Evil was clearly represented in what we regarded as the rapacious U.S. military from General Westmoreland (whose name we always pronounced “west-more-land”) to the Commander-in-Chief himself, the reviled President Johnson. Vietnam era “villains” such as these fit a familiar ethical scenario for us. Driven by greed, power, or ambition they were led to corruption, crime, and violence. We protested, were arrested, and eventually contributed to ending the war.

I have always been proud of my years in the anti-war movement. Not many generations can say that they helped stop a war by means of acts of conscience. However, we certainly did not halt “evil.” And evil still seems easy to recognize. Wars have proliferated over the decades, as have terrorism and fanaticism of all sorts. Everywhere we still see the drive for power and the lure of greed. Moreover, our media are inundated with reports of individuals in the heat of hatred, prejudice, lust, neurosis, or misplaced religious fervor committing heinous crimes and causing enormous suffering. Each day, it seems, there is a media melange of murders, rapes, kidnappings, hate and sex crimes, domestic violence. As we become exposed to these daily horrors I, like many others, often wonder with a shiver, “What could have possessed the people who committed those acts?” At other times, feeling the potential “heat” of such evil-doing in myself, I think, “There but for the grace of God . . . .”

Yet the poignancy of the pilot’s dilemma has continued to prod me into a more difficult and subtle exploration of "evil," the kind that is not so easily recognizable. When reviewing so many events of the last century (dubbed “the ruthless century” by poet Czeslaw Milosz) I was confronted again and again with a different and more enigmatic ethical problem than the obvious “hot” evil scenarios of violence, greed, crime, prejudice, and hatred that have become so familiar. It is certainly true that untold billions of human beings died terrible deaths in the wars of the past century, but a huge percentage of these victims were not killed face to face, accompanied by shouts of passion or hate, but rather from great distances in anonymous slaughter. Almost one-and-a-half million young men (shockingly, their average age was 17 years) were cut down in the battle of the Sommes in World War I. The vast majority were killed by machine-gun and mortar fire. They did not see their killers face to face.

Less than thirty years later hundreds of thousands of non-combatants —mostly women, children, and old men—were incinerated in the span of just a few minutes in the atomic “flashes” over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, death delivered coldly and anonymously from 20,000 feet above. For much of the last half of the twentieth century a nuclear arms race pushed the world to the brink of Armageddon—the unimaginable final destruction of all society and nature by missiles and planes poised on a computer trip line. More recently, the public has been jolted by revelations of a whole new genre of global environmental threats to the biosphere itself, almost unthinkable perils to life on earth that we had not even suspected existed: ozone depletion, global warming, species extinction, acid rain, desertification, deforestation. Which evil people are responsible for these eco-catastrophes? And even as we produce ever more food, hunger increases at an astounding rate so that close to one billion people are starving every day. Who is starving these people?

Here we arrive at a central problem for modern ethics. Evil has never been so omnipresent as it has been over the past century, so perilous to the earth and the very future of humanity. Yet there seem to be very few evil people. It would be difficult for many of us to name any evil people we know personally. The very idea of our society being characterized by masses of evil people seems somewhat comical. All in all, there is a striking paucity of modern Mephistopheleses. And virtually no one identifies oneself as evil. Obviously, few of us relish the thought that our automobile is causing pollution and global warming or laugh fiendishly because refrigerants in our air conditioners are depleting the ozone layer. I have been in many corporate law firms and boardrooms and have yet to see any “high fives” or hear shouts of satisfaction at the deaths, injuries, or crimes against nature these organizations often perpetrate. And as noted, bomber pilots tend to be viewed as heroes, not as mass murderers. We are confronted with an ethical enigma; far from the simple idea of evil we harbored in the past, we now have an evil that apparently does not require evil people to purvey it.

[smiths]

that would be essentially what Arendt called the 'banality of evil' i think

evil is going into Target a buying a $5 t-shirt, evil is advertising and PR, evil is me sitting typing thoughtlessly on a machine built with components that people died in the making of

i see evil people all the time

(just as an aside, where have you popped up from Carol, you have been prolific in your 16 days here, how did you come across RI, and did you post or write somewhere before? - not that its any of my business, just curiosity)

[Carol Newquist]

I've been many places across the internet since it became publicly available under various pseudonyms. I am a long time reader of RI.....even way back before it moved to this php program. I have never posted to this platform before my account was activated as Carol Newquist. This thread prompted me to join and discuss.

[Allegro]

^ Noted.

[smiths]

fair enough ...

slightly tangentially, i was reading about Voltaire and 'l'infame' and came upon this little piece about Camus' The Plague which i think ties into the problem of evil quite well

“I had plague already, long before I came to this town and encountered it here."
He goes on to talk about how plague is not only an active life trying to force people to your will, but it is also a passive negligence: people become habituated in the plague, trying to make it an antiseptic reality ...
“For the plague-stricken their peace of mind is more important than a human life. Decent folks must be allowed to sleep easy at nights, mustn’t they?” It is a vivid confession about not only standing on the sidelines while others die, but of even being complicit in these deaths by our saying nothing.
“Each of us has the plague within him; no one on earth is free from it. And I know, too, that we must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection on him. What’s natural is the microbe. All the rest – - health, integrity, purity (if you like) – - is a product of the human will, of vigilance that must never falter.”

[Project Willow]

We all take part in destroying lives every day, even our own lives. We contribute to the Cold Evil of the technological cocoon in everything we do, up to and including discussing it here and all it entails for us to be able to do that. This Cold Evil is distinct from Hot Evil where harm and trauma are inflicted in person, hand to hand, or mano y mano, in a very personal and up-close way.

Walt journeyed from the inoculated and insular Cold Evil existence where he sleepwalked through life as a long-distance killer like all the rest of us, to the tumultuous, up close and personal Hot Evil existence of adrenaline pumping, primal brutality. Each existence is immoral, but I would argue the former is vastly more dangerous, and exacts much more pain and suffering than Walt's Hot Evil existence, as dramatic and theatrical as it was.

No, they're roughly equivalent taken in an overall perspective, save the instant when one is caught in the cross hairs of a sociopath's obsession, then the dyad of predator and prey is all that matters in life and death. Sociopathy and bystander apathy, exploitative systems and their passive posturing beneficiaries, they cannot exist one without the other. This is the nature of humanity however, our Achilles heal, violence and cruelty work as survival strategies. Only the complexity and nuance of lies we tell ourselves about ourselves change.